On 19 March 2025, the Global CCS Institute held its annual Europe Forum on Carbon Capture and Storage in Brussels, Belgium.
Nearly 300 participants attended the event, representing stakeholders from across the CCS value chain – including policymakers, NGOs, industry leaders, academics, finance specialists, and the general public – to learn about the status of CCS in the region and examine key challenges and opportunities.
CCS progress in Europe and globally: from CCS ambition to real project development
The Institute’s Principal – CCS Technologies, Dr David Kearns, welcomed the audience and provided an overview of CCS progress, trends and challenges observed by the Institute over the last few years. CCS development continues to exhibit strong growth globally, supported by the emergence of new and strengthened policy support across various jurisdictions.
As of February 2025, the Institute counted 65 operational facilities globally, with a capacity to capture around 57 Mtpa of CO2 per year. In addition, 42 facilities are currently under construction. Once completed, these projects will be able to capture an additional 44 Mtpa of CO2, bringing cumulative global capture capacity to over 100 Mtpa. CCS is also showing very strong prospects in Europe, where there are nine operational facilities and 13 under construction.
These positive trends boost confidence that CCS will continue to grow, including in sectors where it has yet to gain a strong foothold.
While the outlook for CCS is positive, difficult investment settings, community concerns and regulatory barriers are among the key challenges currently hindering CCS progress.
State of play and future prospects for CCS in Europe: How policy developments in Europe can contribute to the successful implementation of projects
As a result of the development and implementation of a wide range of supportive policies, legal and regulatory frameworks, and funding arrangements, CCS continues to be at the centre of key discussions held at the EU and national level. In particular, CCS is emerging as a key climate solution able to combine sustainability objectives with the need to preserve the competitiveness of European manufacturing.
Christian Holzleitner, Head of Unit for Land Economy and Carbon Removals at the European Commission, highlighted the crucial steps already taken towards the creation of an integrated CO2 market at the EU level, including the publication of the EU Industrial Carbon Management (ICM) Strategy and, more recently, the Clean Industrial Deal (CID), as well as the entry into force of the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA) and the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Regulation.
The next twenty-four months will be critical for the region’s carbon management future. Eve Tamme, Chair of the Zero Emission Platform (ZEP), pointed out that several first-of-a-kind CCS projects, such as Northern Lights and Porthos, are expected to begin operations during this period. Their success will provide a valuable opportunity to demonstrate the viability of CCS, and to communicate its essential decarbonisation role to the broader public.
Important developments for CCS are expected, driven by the Industrial Decarbonisation Accelerator Act, the revision of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), and the development of an EU regulatory package on CO2 transport infrastructure.
The latter, initially announced in February 2024 as part of the EU ICM Strategy, will help create a common and harmonised approach to the transport of CO2 that is needed to facilitate the development of several cross-border CCS initiatives currently taking shape in Europe.
According to Fredericq Peigneux, Head of Public Affairs at Heidelberg Material, regulatory frameworks should lay the conditions for industry players to reach Final Investment Decisions (FIDs). This result could be achieved by providing easier access to financing and certainty for the emitters that the infrastructure to transport and store the captured CO2 will be in place.
Mr. Holzleitner affirmed that scaling up carbon management in Europe will require creating the right incentives for CCS, CDR and CCU in the ETS, as well as financing carbon contracts for differences.
As a result of the current insufficient ETS price, developing CCS in Europe will require leveraging public resources that, due to their limited availability, will need to be allocated to sectors and industries unable to decarbonise their operations with different options, affirmed Tobias Johan Sørensen, Senior Analyst at CONCITO.
CCS financing and risk mitigation: how to make CCS projects bankable
Alongside supportive policies, project financing is another key factor to drive investment in CCS and help more projects reach FID. In order to advance first-of-a-kind CCS initiatives, both public and private financing is crucial to make projects investable.
CCS projects typically involve multiple stakeholders across the value chain, making risk allocation a challenging task. Since these projects require building both new infrastructure and a new industry at the same time, risk mitigation needs to extend beyond individual projects to the broader ecosystem, noted Urbano Troncoso, Executive Director of Structed Finance at Santander.
Mr Toncoso also explained how project financing is strictly linked to predictability. In this context, governments can play a crucial role as mediators across the value chain, allowing proper risk allocation and enabling project finance.
The UK has undertaken significant steps to create a business case for CCS, identifying industrial clusters to be decarbonised through the shared use of transport and storage networks.
Michael Brown, Head of Funding and Strategy at the UK Government, provided an overview of the UK’s CCS journey, explaining the rationale behind the development of tailored business models for different sectors and components of the CCS value chain. This modular system helped establish a viable investment framework for CCS, which in turn enabled the UK Government to commit up to £21.7 billion in October 2024 to carbon capture and CCUS-enabled hydrogen projects in the HyNet and East Coast Clusters.
The Netherlands also hosts significant CCS activity, facilitated by the inclusion of CCS in the SDE++ funding scheme in 2018. This scheme has been designed to enable the synchronised development of the different components of the CCS value chain towards FIDs and de-risk CCS projects.
While governments can intervene to mitigate some risks and underwrite part of the costs, projects still have to undertake some remaining technical risks in order to become bankable.
According to Andrew Lee, Managing Director at Société Générale, CCS projects can be financed and built if they follow a proper structure and rationale within the available supporting mechanisms framework.
Developing CO2 storage capacity across Europe: Challenges and opportunities to advance CO2 storage projects.
In recent years, Europe has seen increased activity on storage development, aiming to fill the gap between the CO2 capture capacity of the project in the pipeline and the storage capacity being developed in the region.
Developing effective and durable policies and regulations is an essential step to enable CO2 storage projects to advance.
The NZIA represents a pivotal regulation at the EU level that, with a target to reach 50 Mtpa of injection capacity by 2030 in the EU, is expected to advance the CO2 storage development across the bloc.
These sorts of goals represent a small step towards climate neutrality and, although ambitious, set a target that can be met with the options currently on the table, affirmed Toby Lockwood, Technology and Markets Director, Carbon Capture Europe at the Clean Air Task Force.
Countries in Europe have also taken steps or are working towards developing their national regulatory framework for CCS.
One of the countries in the EU that is taking the lead in CO2 storage development and aims to position itself as a future CCS hub in the region is Denmark. To this end, the country has created the necessary framework to enable CO2 storage in the country. Jesper Brandrup, Team Lead at the Danish Energy Agency, explained how the country is driving interest in CO2 storage development through the CCS Fund, as well as the process that led to the award of several CO2 storage exploration licences, both offshore and onshore.
According to Ane Elisabet Lothe, Research Manager at SINTEF, there is enough CO2 storage potential in the region.
Most of the storage capacity developed in Europe so far is concentrated around the North Sea, but new storage opportunities are emerging in countries such as Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania, helping to address regional disparities in CO₂ storage capacity.
Efthimios Tartaras, Head of Geoscience at HEREMA, noted that Greece is in the process of preparing a full regulatory framework applicable to CCS and is exploring the transformation of a near-depleted oil and gas field at the Prinos site into a CO₂ storage facility. As the country has more limited storage potential compared to other North Sea actors, Greece is also looking at opportunities outside its national borders and the EU. Earlier this year, Greece signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Egypt in order to strengthen collaboration in the field of CCS.
Alongside having the right policy and regulatory framework in place, panellists also recognised the importance of establishing public and private partnerships. The latter can help address regulatory barriers around cross-border CO2 transport outside the EEA and tackle cross-chain risks that are preventing projects from reaching financial close.
Breakout Sessions: Key insights from engaging in conversation with the audience
As part of the event agenda, the Institute hosted five breakout sessions during which, with the help of our partner organisations, we turned to our audience to hear their views and thoughts on a number of ongoing discussions within the CCS community in Europe. In particular, we engaged with the audience in fruitful conversation around issues related to onshore storage, CO2 transportation, CCS financing, carbon removals and the Carbon Management Challenge (CMC).
Breakout session facilitators from the Institute, DNV, CCSA and IEAGHG provided a high-level recap of the discussions conducted in each breakout group, highlighting some of the insights that emerged from the engagement with the attendees.
During the breakout sessions, conversations delved into different topics, touching on:
- The importance of global collaboration and knowledge sharing in achieving our climate goals and the launch of stakeholder mechanisms as part of the Carbon Management Challenge (CMC), through which stakeholders will have the chance to get involved and engage in the framework of the CMC;
- Lessons learned from onshore CO2 storage by front-runners in Europe, as well as the benefits and challenges linked to onshore CO2 storage project development in Europe;
- Demand and incentives for carbon removals activities, as well as the future potential integration of carbon removals in the EU ETS;
- Approaches that can help optimise CCS projects and value chain costs, and support sufficient business models for CCS deployment;
- CO2 standards, cross-border cooperation and funding strategies to unlock access to CO2 transport in Europe.
Conclusions
With a packed agenda and a record level of attendance, the Institute’s 2025 Europe Forum, once again, offered a key platform for the CCS community in the region to foster meaningful dialogue among relevant stakeholders on current trends and future prospects for CCS in Europe.
Thanks to the active engagement of our speakers and participants, the Europe Forum on CCS facilitated exchanges with experts in the field and offered opportunities to build partnerships and new forms of cooperation.
Global collaboration is key to advance the CCS value chain at the required speed and scale, and the Institute looks forward to continuing to work alongside the CCS community in Europe and beyond to accelerate CCS deployment.
